David's Book Club

One of our most popular features at the old FrumForum site was a weekly book review under the heading "David's Bookshelf." I am bringing the bookshelf to the Daily Beast and widening the contributors as well. This post will be the hub for all book reviews that we have written, both on FrumForum and at the Daily Beast.

James A. Garfield has always been for me one of the great might-have-beens of American history. Millard tells the story of a man's journey from poverty to the American presidency, and the dramatic history of his assassination and legacy.

We live in an accordion economy: the 1% of the 1%, whose rate of gain since 1980 has recreated in this new century the concentrated wealth once supposed to have vanished with the Great Crash and New Deal.

Americans will do anything for Canada except read about it. But with the financial crisis and the looming debt crisis, it's time to see what our neighbors to the north did when they were in similar trouble.

Given the impressive success of the Obama administration with the "kill" part of the War on Terror, it begs the question, can the United States lawfully kill terrorist suspects outside of a set-piece battle?

Social historian Frank Snowden offers a very different route to an answer about the relative underdevelopment of Southern Italy.We're used to thinking of malaria as a disease that besets Africa and other very poor places. Wrong.

Since the 1970s, gay politics have meant left politics, or at least liberal politics. It is surprising, then, for some to discover how many of the leading figures of the hard-right anticommunist movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s were gay.

Proust promises to unlock the secrets of the sexual awakening of young women in his second volume of Remembrance of Things Past. Although he turns out to be not a reliable dating coach, Proust is, believe it or not, a very biting comedian - and a very astute observer of politics.

Bain Capital partner Edward Conard's controversial oligarchy-apologist book is a systematic defense of the pre-crash U.S. economic system against its post-crash critics. One thing he wants to debunk at the very outset: that stagnated wages are a result of low-skilled immigrants.

David Copperfield tends not to head the Dickens canon. The plot finale is unconvincing and the autobiographical element seems to be the product of a writer in the grip of a bout of self-satisfaction. That said, Dickens' genius for the creation of comic characters is worked almost to rococo excess in this novel.

Jim Manzi gives us an intriguing investigation of the power, limits, and varieties of empirical knowledge. The book ranges widely across issues before reaching the conclusion that government policies might be improved if careful experimentation is used.

Much of the interest in Jack Abramoff’s 'Capitol Punishment' comes from figuring out the author’s political purposes. While Capitol Punishment gives you much of this, it also has a surprising emotional side to it.

Mamet discusses his conversion experience from liberalism to conservatism. His journey is fascinating because the ideas that attracted him to modern ideological conservatism are those that I have found increasingly off-putting.

The social effects of the Great Recession mean a harsher reality for most Americans. The new jobs being added to the U.S. economy pay less, on average, than the jobs lost, and the 1% have already financially recovered.

An unapologetic attempt to soberly address one of America’s greatest social problems: the decline and collapse of the American family. How bad is it in America? The worst in the industrialized world for starters.

Haidt praises conservative intellectuals but not the Republican Party. The book seeks to explain "Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" and what are the psychological and biological basis to explain why we vote the way we do?

Chris Mooney is a journalist focused on the intersection of science and politics. An avowed liberal, he seeks to explain his critique of conservatives in psychology and biology. The right and left, he contends, differ in more ways than just opinion.